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This worship service was conducted at First Church, Unitarian, in Athol, Mass. The sermon itself was extemporaneous, and the readings and introduction exist in manuscript form only.

This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at First Church, Unitarian, of Athol, Massachusetts. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2003 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The reading this morning is from the first page of the book Returning: A Spiritual Journey, by Dan Wakefield.

One balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before my forty-eighth birthday, I woke up screaming. I got out of bed, went into the next room, sat down on a couch, and screamed again. This was not, in other words, one of those waking nightmares left over from sleep that is dispelled by the comforting light of day. It was, rather, a response to the reality that another morning had broken in a life I could only deal with sedated by wine, loud noises, moving images, and wired to electronic games that further distracted my fragmented attention from a growing sense of blank, nameless pain in the pit of my very being, my most essential self. It was the beginning of a year in which I would have scored in the upper percentile of those popular magazine tests that list the greatest stresses of life: I left the house I owned, the city I was living in, the work I was doing, the woman I had lived with for seven years and had hoped to remain with the rest of my life, ran out of money, discovered I had endangered my health, and attended the funeral of my father in May and my mother in November.

The day I woke up screaming I grabbed from among my books an old Bible I hadn’t opened for nearly a quarter of a century. With a desperate instinct I turned to the Twenty-third Psalm and read it over, several times, the words and the King James cadence bringing a sense of relief and comfort, a kind of emotional balm. In the coming chaotic days and months I sometimes recited that psalm over in my mind, and it always had that calming effect, but it did not give me any sense that I believed in God again. The psalm simply seemed an isolated source of solace and calm, such as any great poem might be. [p. 1 ff.]

Sermon

Some of you may remember having read Dan Wakefield’s words from this morning’s reading. As I said, the reading is from a book called Returning, which was quite popular after it was published back in 1988. And the book was based in part on articles Dan Wakefield wrote for the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and GQ magazine back in 1984 and 1985. Dan Wakefield’s articles and books made quite an impression on quite a number of people back then. Which was remarkable, because what Dan Wakefield was saying was, in essence, that religion and spirituality turned out to be central to his life.

If Dan Wakefield had been an evangelical Christian, no one would have cared if religion had been at the center of his life; no one would have cared about his spirituality. But Wakefield was a tough, skeptical journalist and novelist. He was tough: his first book was about the year he spent living in Spanish Harlem. He was no angel: his best-selling novel, written in the 1960’s, was called Going All the Way — and the novel was not the story of someone going all the way to heaven, it was the story of a couple of guys who were trying to lose their virginity. He had worked as a sports reporter, he hung out in bars, he wrote scripts for network TV, he was typical in many ways of the hard-bitten, hard-drinking (male) writer of the middle twentieth century.

Writers of that type tended not to have religious feelings; or if they did, they kept them to themselves. When Dan Wakefield rediscovered the spiritual dimension of his life, that was important to him. But then he published articles about it, and they were published in respectable mainstream secular newspapers and magazines. He wrote a book that sold well enough that Penguin Books picked it up and published it in paperback. Bill Moyers called the book “one of the most important memoirs of the spirit that I’ve ever read.”

All this was enough to make people begin to sit up and take notice — maybe something was going on here. Maybe our spiritual lives are something that we really can’t separate off from the rest of our lives; we can’t just keep them to ourselves. And Dan seemed to be going farther than that: he seemed to be saying that it was, in fact, important that we talk about our spiritual lives with other people; that we share our spiritual stories with those around us.

Dan said this about his book Returning: “This book originated in the living room of the King’s Chapel parish house in Boston, where a group of ten people sat around a table sharing their life experiences in a course in ‘religious autobiography’ taught by the minister [Rev. Carl Scovel].” Carl Scovel (who, by the way, is a Unitarian Universalist minister), over a period of some years had developed a series of exercises to help people remember the story of their lives. A key part of Carl Scovel’s course in “religious autobiography” was that you did your remembering in a group with other people. Everybody did the exercises together, and then they wrote about their memories, and then they read what they had written, out loud, to the others taking the course. A good part of the power in that original course that Dan Wakefield took lay in the sharing of stories with the other nine people sitting around that table in King’s Chapel parish house.

After he had written his own religious autobiography, Dan Wakefield began to lead religious autobiography courses himself. He wanted to expand the idea beyond the King’s Chapel community. He began leading what he called spiritual autobiography courses through the Boston Center for Adult Education; he chose the term because the word “spiritual” felt more inclusive than “religious.” Those courses went so well that he began offering them in other venues. He led spiritual autobiography courses at yoga centers, in a gym at the Rancho La Puerta health spa in New Mexico, at the Episcopal monastery in Cambridge, at University Unitarian Church in Seattle; he even incorporated some of the exercises into a graduate course in writing that he taught at Emerson College. He found that there was great power in this idea of spiritual autobiography; that here was something that touched people’s lives deeply, with immediacy.

Now where did this power come from? You sit around with some other people and write the story of your life — what makes that so powerful? Dan Wakefield has offered some reasons why, but I’ve never been quite satisfied with his reasons; partly because I think ultimately he wants to give most of the credit to God.

I’m not sure I can agree that God necessarily provides the power behind the course. I’ve been leading spiritual autobiography courses myself since I experienced some of Dan’s exercises in a course I took with him at Emerson College in 1991, and I’ve helped lay people lead the course as well. I’ve watched liberal Christians and bedrock atheists take the course, and both believers and non-believers have felt some kind of power in writing spiritual autobiographies as a part of a group. I’m neither an atheist nor a believer. I’m not going to argue for or against the power of God as it may or may not affect your life. So it is that I find myself searching for another explanation.

Over the past couple of months, a group of five people from this church have been meeting with me on Sunday evenings, and we have pursued together this course in spiritual autobiography. As always, the stories that the participants read to each other, the memories that they shared in the course, moved me to the depths of my soul. And I kept asking myself, can I explain a little of the power that I felt from hearing these spiritual autobiographies?

I shared an idea with the group of why I thought this course could be so powerful. It can be so powerful because it gets right to the heart of one of the fundamental religious questions: who am I? I know that for myself I haven’t often come to church to find out what I believe about God. And speaking just for myself, I know that I have never come to church to listen to creeds and doctrines. What I believe in has become less and less important to me over the years.

I don’t want to ask what I believe in. I want to ask what I feel is the most fundamental religious question: Who am I? I want to learn who I am in relation to other people, and I want to know that others can accept me for who I am. I want to learn what it is that I hold most dear so that I can begin to know what it is that I should do. I want to know something about the core of my being, what it is about me that is most permanent, that has survived through hard times. Who am I? What is the core of my being?

The last meeting of our spiritual autobiography class this spring took place last Sunday, and at the end of the meeting, after we had listened to two people read their spiritual autobiographies, I took a few minutes and asked the members of the group if they could sum up their spiritual autobiographies in one sentence. The three people who were present that evening gave me permission to share their answers with you. Lyn Kimmel said, “I’m a person who doesn’t have the answers, but I enjoy searching for the questions.” Peg Robinson wondered if she had made the right choices at times, and then said, “I’m still searching and changing.” Bob Coyle managed to sum up his life in three words: “I’m still seeking.”

Bob added a story that he has given me permission to share with you. As a young man, Bob worked at a meat counter, selling cuts of meat. Bob says that at that time he really knew nothing about meat, a fact that was probably obvious to everyone who knew him. But as soon as he put on that white apron and stepped behind the meat counter, people assumed that he was a meat expert, and they would ask him meat questions: What cut would be best for such and such a recipe? Will this cut serve two people? (To which question a co-worker once responded, “Yes, if one of you doesn’t like meat.”) Bob’s point was that we have to take on roles in our lives, and these can shape who we are, and how others see us.

As I thought about Bob’s story of the meat counter, it began to occur to me wherein lies part of the power of the spiritual autobiography course. Church is one place where we don’t have to take on roles with quite the deadly seriousness required of us in most of the rest of the world. Yes, Sally is the chair of the Board of Managers, so yes, she does have a role that she plays here at church. But that is different than putting on that white apron and stepping behind the meat counter. I think the difference lies in the fact that here at church we can see more of who someone is. When you put on that white apron and step behind the meat counter, people tend to see the white apron and not the person wearing the white apron. When you come to church, there’s more of a chance that people will see you as you, not as one of the roles you have to play.

And when you participate in a spiritual autobiography group, there is even more of a chance that the others in the group can see you as yourself. The course starts off by asking you to remember who you were as a child. When you read your childhood memories to the group, you strip away the roles you have accumulated over the years: as a child, you were not a parent, or a lover, or an employee, or a Board chair, or someone who worked at a meat counter. Who are you when your roles don’t get in the way?

And there is something in the process of remembering. When I talk to the woman at the meat counter at Crosby’s supermarket where I shop, I don’t know where she has come from, nor who she once was. Even when I got to Vanderhoof’s hardware and talk to Scott Vanderhoof, even though I remember when he was just a young man and his father ran the store, Scott is still defined for me by his role as a hardware man. That can happen at church, too, but when I sit down with someone and hear their memories, hear how they have grown and changed over the years, then I begin to understand them as the complex, changing, spiritual beings that they truly are. We have a core, a kernel somewhere, a part of us that is not some role we fill in day-to-day life.

I noticed, as I’m sure you did, that Peg and Lyn and Bob all summed up their lives by talking about changing, and seeking, and searching for the questions. Sometimes I sum up my life by saying that I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to be when I grow up; and while I mean it partially as a joke, it is also the truth. What am I going to be when I grow up? I still don’t know; I still keep changing. It’s a little frightening at times: in my forties, and I still don’t know what I’m doing, or who I really am, or why I’m here.

Maybe we never figure out who we’re going to be when we grow up. In that case, I feel that what lies at the core is the remembering. I may not know who I’m going to be. I may not even be able to say who I am now. But I can remember a little bit of who I was; I can remember what I have done with my life (both for good and ill); I can remember the people around me who have shaped me, and in some cases whom I have helped to shape.

Dan Wakefield wrote, “One balmy spring morning in Hollywood, a month or so before my forty-eighth birthday, I woke up screaming. I got out of bed, went into the next room, sat down on a couch, and screamed again” (– a not-uncommon reaction to life, by the way, although we New Englanders are culturally less likely to actually scream out loud).

He screamed because something was wrong with his life. He didn’t know who he was any more. As he tells the story, there remained something in him that wanted to survive, and so he began to change his life. He stopped drinking, he started exercising, he did all those things that you are supposed to do. All that he did certainly helped; his health improved; he stopped screaming when he awakened in the morning. But the turning point for Dan Wakefield was going back to church, taking the spiritual autobiography class with Carl Scovel, and remembering who he was at his core. And in so doing, in becoming a part of a community where experienced him not as some role he filled, but a person, he became more whole. This connection of us and the past; both our own past, and the greater past. Towards the end of his book, Dan writes that he interviewed Carl Scovel on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the founding of King’s Chapel. Carl Scovel said:

I think our parishioners are people who like to feel they are a part of a ‘flow,’ of a stream of events. We have a very strong sense of history, and I think it’s important for people who do not feel ‘isolated in time’ — who do not feel this year is totally different from all other years, but want to know they are part of what’s happened and will be part of what happens.”

So said Carl Scovel.

The memories are not just our own. Some are memories that come from parents or ancestors, from the community, from humanity. In the act of remembering, we dip our toes into the river of humanity, which is also the river of all life. To ask, “Who am I?” is to invite the answer that while I am a person, I am connected to all humanity, I am a part of the greater life of the universe. I am not alone, nor are you. We are not alone because there are those who have gone before us; and there are those who will succeed us, and remember us in their turn. The immortality flows through us in memories, as we become a part of that flow when we are remembered; we are connected through the river that flows through all: that which was, that which is, and that which shall be.

This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at First Church of Athol [Massachusetts], Unitarian. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2003 Daniel Harper.

The children’s story told about Palm Sunday: link.

Sermon

We sit here this morning in a historically Unitarian church. Some of you here this morning went to Sunday school in what was historically a Unitarian church — perhaps in this very church. I, too, grew up in a historically Unitarian church, and the story of Easter I heard as a child was the Unitarian story of Easter.

I love our Unitarian version of the Easter story, and I’m glad the children are with us this morning to hear this story. Why is our version of the story different? When we retell that story, we don’t assume that Jesus was God. And that leads to all kinds of little changes that add up in the end…. Tell you what, let’s just listen to the Unitarian story of Easter and find out what it all adds up to in the end.

We left Jesus as he was entering the city of Jerusalem, being wlecomed by people carrying flowers and waving palm fronds.

On that first day in Jerusalem, Jesus did little more than look around in the great Temple of Jerusalem — the Temple that was the holiest place for Jesus and for all other Jews. Jesus noticed that there were a number of people selling things in the Temple (for example, there were people selling pigeons), and besides that there were all kinds of comings and goings through the Temple, people carrying all kinds of gear, taking shortcuts by going through the Temple.

The next day, Jesus returned to the Temple. He walked in, chased out the people selling things, and upset the tables of the moneychangers. Needless to say, he created quite a commotion! and I imagine that a crowd gathered around to see what this stranger, this traveling rabbi, was up to. Once the dust had settled, Jesus turned to the gathered crowd, and quoted from the Hebrew scriptures, the book of Isaiah where God says, “My Temple shall be known as a place of prayer for all nations.” Jesus said it was time that the Temple went back to being a place of prayer — how could you pray when there were people buying and selling things right next to you? How could you pray with all those pigeons cooing?

I don’t know about you, but I think Jesus did the right thing in chasing the pigeon-dealers, the moneylenders, and the other salespeople out of the Temple. But the way he did managed to annoy the powerful people who ran the Temple. It made them look bad. They didn’t like that.

In the next few days, Jesus taught and preached all through Jerusalem. We know he quoted the book of Leviticus, where it says, “You are to love your neighbor as yourself.” He encouraged people to be genuinely religious, to help the weak and the poor. Jesus also got into fairly heated discussions with some of Jerusalem’s religious leaders, and he was so good at arguing that once again, he made those powerful people look bad. Once again, they didn’t like that.

Meanwhile, other things were brewing in Jerusalem. The Romans governed Jerusalem at that time. The Romans were also concerned about Jesus. When Jesus rode into the city, he was welcomed by a crowd of people who treated him as if he were one of the long-lost kings of Israel. That made the Romans worry. Was Jesus planning some kind of secret religious rebellion? How many followers did he have? What was he really up to, anyway?

Jesus continued his teaching and preaching from Sunday until Thursday evening, when Passover began. Since Jesus and his disciples were all good observant Jews, after sundown on Thursday they celebrated a Passover Seder together. They had the wine, the matzoh, the bitter herbs, all the standard things you have at a Seder. (By the way, if you’ve ever heard of “Maundy Thursday,” which is always the Thursday before Easter Sunday, that’s the commemoration of that last meal; and while not all Bible scholars agree that least meal was in fact a Seder, many scholars do think it was a Seder.)

After the Seder, Jesus was restless and depressed. He had a strong sense that the Romans or the powerful religious leaders were going to try to arrest him for stirring up trouble, for agitating the people of Jerusalem. He didn’t know how or when it would happen, but he was pretty sure he would be arrested sometime.

As it happened, Jesus was arrested just a few hours after the Seder. He was given a trial the same night he was arrested, and he was executed the next day. The Romans put him to death using a common but very unpleasant type of execution known as crucifixion. (And the day of Jesus’ execution, the Friday before Easter, is called “Good Friday,” a day when many Christians commemorate Jesus’ death.)

Because the Jewish sabbath started right at sundown, and Jewish law of the time did not allow you to bury anyone on the Sabbath day, Jesus’ friends couldn’t bury him right away. There were no funeral homes back in those days, so Jesus’ friends put his body in a tomb, a sort of cave cut into the side of a hill, where the body would be safe until after the Sabbath was over.

First thing Sunday morning, some of Jesus’ friends went to the tomb to get the body ready for burial. But to their great surprise, the body was gone, and there was a man there in white robes who talked to them about Jesus!

When I was a child, my Unitarian mother or my Unitarian Universalist Sunday school teachers would tell me that what had probably happened is that some of Jesus’ other friends had come along, and had already buried the body. You see, there must have been a fair amount of confusion that first Easter morning. Jesus’ friends were upset that he was dead, and they were worried that one or more of them might be arrested, too, or even executed. The burial must have taken place in secret, and probably not everybody got told when and where the burial was. Thus, by the time some of Jesus’ followers had gotten to the tomb, others had already buried his body.

Some of Jesus’ followers began saying that Jesus had risen from the dead, and following that several people even claimed to have spoken with him. My mother always said that we Unitarian Universalists don’t believe that Jesus actually arose from the dead. It’s just that his friends were so sad, and missed him so much, that they wanted to believe that he was alive again.

That’s our Unitarian version of the Easter story. It’s a good story, but it doesn’t really have a very snappy ending. The standard ending of the Easter story has a lot more pizzazz, doesn’t it? In a literal, orthodox Christian story of Easter, Jesus gets to rise from the dead — not just in some metaphorical sense, but really rise from the dead! Jesus comes back to life and talks to various people, angels in dazzling robes appear, Jesus even shares a meal of grilled fish with some of the disciples. Now that’s what I call an ending!

Yet while the orthdox version of the Easter story has a better ending, I don’t find that version of the story satisfying at all. Because by emphasizing the allegedly miraculous aspects of Jesus’ death, I feel you cover over what is truly important about Jesus. What is truly important about Jesus is his life and his teaching. He taught one of the great truths of the ages: That if you want to be a good person, you are to love your neighbor as you love yourself. He taught another great truth of the ages: that you should love God with all your heart and all your mind (and for the word “God” you can feel free to substitute something like “truth” or “that which is highest and best”).

Everything else, as Jesus himself says, is commentary on these two great truths. Thus, to me — to many, if not most, Unitarian Universalists — the story of Easter is far less important than the great truths that Jesus taught in the days leading up to Easter. The story of Easter is less important than the example Jesus sets for us when, like Socrates before him, and like many others since, Jesus gave his life in service of those great truths.

With our ending for the Easter story, we lose the whole notion that Jesus is somehow God. We lose some of the poetry of the story. Yet what we gain is a sense of a life lived for the sake of truth. For us Unitarian Universalists, Jesus doesn’t need miracles to be great. For us, Jesus doesn’t need to literally rise up from the dead for his truth to live on in us. What we gain is the example of a life lived for the sake of truth.

Truth will shine forth, in spite of human wrongs and human injustices. Jesus was arrested by small-minded men; as Bible scholar Carole Fontaine puts it, he was “an innocent man executed on trumped-up political charges” — yet the truths that Jesus taught during his life live on in spite of all efforts to silence him. This is all the resurrection I will ever need to believe in: the constant and ongoing resurrection of the wisdom of the ages; the resurrection of truth, as in each age truth shines forth in the lives and deeds of great women and men.

We live in a troubled age, with wars and rumors of wars; an age when we are too ready to stoop to violence; an age where sometimes we are required to use violence. We remain in need of the truths Jesus taught, truths that were grounded in love. It is up to us to resurrect the truths of Jesus once again:

To love God (or, to love what is highest in best in the world) — with your whole heart, with your whole mind, with your whole might.

And, — To love your neighbor as yourself.

May we live out our lives in the spirit of these two truths. And that will be all the resurrection that we ever need.